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Sometimes you will want to temporarily remove changes from your working
tree and restore them later, For instance to commit a small bug-fix you
found while working on something. Bazaar allows you to put changes on
a shelf to achieve this. When you want to restore the changes later
you can use unshelve to apply them to your working tree again.

For example, consider a working tree with one or more changes made ...

$ bzr diff
=== modified file 'description.txt'
--- description.txt
+++ description.txt
@@ -2,7 +2,7 @@
===============
These plugins
-by Michael Ellerman
+written by Michael Ellerman
provide a very
fine-grained 'undo'
facility
@@ -11,6 +11,6 @@
This allows you to
undo some of
your changes,
-commit, and get
+perform a commit, and get
back to where you
were before.

The shelve command interactively asks which changes
you want to retain in the working tree:

If there are lots of changes in the working tree, you
can provide the shelve command with a list of files
and you will only be asked about changes in those files.
After shelving changes, it’s a good idea to use diff
to confirm the tree has just the changes you expect:

If you want to, you can put multiple items on the shelf.
Normally each time you run unshelve the most recently
shelved changes will be reinstated. However, you can also
unshelve changes in a different order by explicitly
specifying which changes to unshelve.

Bazaar merges the changes in to your working tree, so they
will apply even if you have edited the files since you shelved
them, though they may conflict, in which case you will have to
resolve the conflicts in the same way you do after a conflicted
merge.